He Called Himself Blind and Kept Me Poor, So I Let Him Watch Me Leave novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Raffle Night
The mic dies, a number flashes silently on the screen, and Floyd names it; Brinley tests him with a plate of chocolate tart, walks out, and watches him cross the lobby without his cane.
The microphone died in the middle of the raffle, and the winning number went up on the big screen with nobody saying it out loud.
Four hundred people in the Lindqvist Mutual holiday party looked up at it and waited for the emcee to fix his mic.
4417.
I had that ticket in my purse.
I had not shown it to anyone, because I was busy deciding whether eleven dollars would last until Friday.
The prize was a hundred-dollar grocery card, and I wanted it more than I had ever wanted a raffle prize.
Floyd squeezed my knee under the tablecloth.
"Brinley," he said. "That's us. Go."
I looked at him.
He was sitting beside me at table nine with his cane hooked over the back of his chair and his face turned toward the stage.
He had been blind for four years, ever since a van ran a red light and hit his motorcycle.
Three years ago he had sat at our kitchen table with tears running down his face and begged me never to take a second job.
"Stay at your desk, Brin. Please. I'll find a way to provide for us. Just let me do that."
So I stayed.
I paid the rent, the groceries, the electric bill and his therapy copays out of one claims adjuster's salary.
I turned down the weekend shift at the garden center and the evening spot at the bakery.
I went without lunch more days than I would admit to anyone.
"How do you know it's ours?" I said.
"You told me the number in the car."
I had not told him the number in the car.
I had not told him the number at all, because I had pulled the ticket from the basket myself after he went to the restroom with Kelsey's arm to guide him.
Hank Barnaby leaned over from the next seat.
Hank had the desk beside mine at work, and he was sixty-one and had never said a mean word about anybody.
"Nobody said that number out loud, Floyd," he said. "The mic's been dead for a minute."
"Kelsey whispered it to me," Floyd said.
"I didn't," said Kelsey.
She was sitting on my other side, and she said it before she thought about it.
Then she put her hand on my arm and smiled.
Kelsey Huber ran payroll upstairs.
She had been my best friend since our freshman dorm, and she was the reason my ticket to this party had cost me nothing.
She had paid for it herself and never mentioned it.
"I mean, I did, a little," she said. "He was asking. You know how he gets, Brin. Eat your shrimp."
I did not eat my shrimp.
I picked up the winning ticket, and I did not go to the stage.
I took the dessert plate from the middle of the table, the one with the chocolate tart on it, and I held it in front of Floyd's face.
"What's on this plate?"
"Brinley, you know I can't."
His eyes went to the tart.
They went there and stayed for a second, and then they slid sideways to me, and I watched him understand that I had seen it.
Nobody at table nine said anything.
Hank put down his fork.
"He looked at it," Hank said quietly. "Brinley. He looked right at it."
"Brin." Kelsey's hand tightened on my arm. "Sweetheart, listen. The doctors said his eyes might track light sometimes. It doesn't mean anything. Don't do this in front of everyone. Let's go home and talk about it, just the three of us."
She said it very gently, and she said it fast.
I thought about the Lowell Savings envelope Floyd had slid into our kitchen drawer that afternoon.
"Bills," he had said. "I've got them."
He had never paid a bill in the three years I had known him.
I looked at the man I had kept the lights on for.
His face was perfectly still, and he did not ask what I was doing.
A blind man would have asked.
So I took my keys off my ring, and I put the apartment key on the tablecloth next to his plate.
"I'm done," I said.
Then I stood up and walked out of the ballroom with four hundred people turning to watch me go.
I did not stop at the coat check.
I walked straight through the hotel lobby with my coat still on my chair, and the glass doors opened for me, and cold air hit my face.
Behind me, a man's shoes crossed the marble floor fast.
"Brinley. Wait."
I turned around.
Floyd was coming across the lobby with his cane folded in his jacket pocket.
He walked around the luggage cart and past the potted tree and between two women in sequins, without touching a single thing.
His eyes were on my face the whole way.
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